Global Network Business-for-Sale Platform
Henry Ford is still best known for his 1908 Model T, an inexpensive automobile that almost anyone could own. But his real innovation was integrating the conveyor belt into assembly line production. The inspiration came from the meat packing industry. There, factory workers bled, skinned, and sliced ugly carcasses into smooth chops and filets. Ford adapted the process for cars Read More …
Tinder parent company Match Group announced Monday that it plans to bring background checks to the dating app later this year. To do so, it plans to work with Garbo , a New York nonprofit focused on background checks around violence and abuse, to make it easy for people to find out if their matches have documented histories of such behavior. While the exact details remain to be determined, Match Group head of safety Tracey Breeden says users can expect to see a feature based on the partnership appear in Tinder in 2021. Since Tinder is one of the company’s most popular dating apps, it’s a natural place to try the feature, she says, but if it is successful there users are likely to see it appear in Match’s other apps as well, including OKCupid, Hinge, and Plenty of Fish. Tracy Breeden [Photo: courtesy of Tinder] Garbo’s overall goal is to work with vulnerable populations including women, people of color, and LGBT people to protect them from gender-based violence. It aims to provide inexpensive or free access to information that’s buried in paywalled court records or otherwise difficult for people to access, like convictions for crimes of violence or civil restraining orders. “We fundamentally believe that public record access should be free, if not very, very low cost,” says Garbo founder Kathryn Kosmides, who is herself a survivor of gender-based violence. Relationship violence is unfortunately quite common , especially against women, and violence linked to dating services has existed long before the internet. Tinder already provides users with safety tips like meeting in public and avoiding accepting drinks from strangers, as well as ways to report people who behave inappropriately on the platform. Match Group announced a partnership with the anti-sexual violence group, Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), late last year , to review its existing safety measures and reporting tools. Read More …
Vaccine passports—proof that you’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19—are at this point an inevitability. Countries including Seychelles, Cyprus, Georgia, Romania, Poland, Iceland, and Estonia will require travelers to have a COVID-19 vaccination to enter. Now, lots of tech companies are working on building apps that certify a traveler is vaccinated. But there are a few problems with vaccine passports, and the World Health Organization has voiced its distaste for the concept. The main concern is that vaccine distribution is not globally equitable and vaccine passports could create social stratification. “At the present time the use of certification of vaccination as a requirement for travel is not advised because quite simply vaccination is just not available enough around the world and is not available certainly on an equitable basis,” said Michael Ryan, head of the WHO’s health-emergencies program, at a press conference. The organization says that it thinks providing vaccinated people with an official certification is valuable for public health purposes, but that vaccination should not entitle a person to more freedoms than an unvaccinated person. This is particularly true, the WHO notes, because there is no proof that any of the COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of COVID-19 Read More …
The digital divide can be deadly. That has been the stark lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed how decades of underinvestment in digital infrastructure have left millions of Americans cut off from help during COVID-19. This has prevented many from finding vaccine appointments, it has thwarted efforts to release contact-tracing apps, and now it’s undermining the safety of the vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccines have been widely heralded as incredibly safe and effective, far exceeding even the most optimistic hopes for how quickly and effectively we could develop the jab. But given the historic speed with which the vaccines were rolled out, more data is needed. This is why the CDC developed v-safe , a long-term vaccine surveillance program. Post-injection surveillance is crucial, not only to monitor for side effects (which are quite rare and mild), but also to remind users about their second dose and monitor how long the vaccines remain effective. The problem is that the CDC made a crucial error, one that could undermine v-safe and lead to blind spots in the data it collects. You see, v-safe requires a smartphone. That may not sound like a big hurdle, but the truth is that at least one in five Americans lacks access to a smartphone. Read More …
For the last two decades, we’ve been putting our browser tabs in the wrong place, and the latest version of Microsoft Edge proves it. Last week, Edge added support for vertical tabs, transforming the traditional tab row at the top of the browser into a column that runs down the left side. To make the switch, you just tap the little square icon on the far-left side of the tab row. Switching back is easy enough—just hit the same icon at the top of the sidebar—but if you’re an Edge user, I strongly suggest resisting the urge. Like any big user interface change, vertical tabs take some getting used to. But if you stick with it for a couple of weeks, as I’ve been doing through Edge’s beta version, you may soon realize that the sidebar is where your tabs should have been all along. Making the most of vertical tabs The best thing about vertical tabs is that you can comfortably fit more of them on the screen. Running Edge on a 24-inch, 1440p monitor, I can only load seven tabs in horizontal mode before Edge starts shrinking them down and cutting off page titles. Switching to vertical mode lets me view 26 tabs at the same time without shrinking down page titles at all. Even if you have more tabs than can fit on the screen, Edge lets you scroll up or down the list with your mouse or touchpad, just like you’d scroll through a web page. As Lifehacker’ s David Murphy points out , vertical tabs get even more useful when you combine them with Tab Groups, a still-experimental feature that you can find by typing edge://flags into your address bar and then entering “Tab Groups” in the search field. You should see options for “Tab Groups,” “Tab Groups Auto Create,” and “Tab Groups Collapse.” I suggest setting all three to “Enabled.” Once you’ve done that, right-click any tab and select “Add tab to a new group.” You can then color-code the group, give it a name, and drag other tabs into it. Clicking on the tab name or color will collapse or expand the group, and Edge will occasionally create some groups of its own, usually when you open several tabs from the same site. Although I’ve mentioned Tab Groups before, I never used it much with horizontal tabs because it didn’t do much to prevent clutter. With the extra space afforded by vertical tabs, those groups finally have room to breathe. To be clear, Microsoft didn’t invent the vertical tab menu. Opera popularized the concept years ago but abandoned it after rebuilding its browser around Google’s source code. (Some users still cling to the old version of Opera specifically for its vertical tab support .) Vivaldi, which was created by one of Opera’s founders , lets users reposition the tab bar to the right, left, or bottom edge of the browser Read More …